Hi Dominic - I share similar concerns about an unbounded number of topics, despite testing with 10k topics. I’m not sure a topic being considered active vs inactive makes a difference from broker/consumer perspective? I think there would minimally have to be some topic cleanup that happens, and I’m not sure the impact of deleting topics in bulk will have on the system either.
A couple of tangent notes related to container reuse to improve performance: - I’m putting together the concurrent activation PR[1] (to allow reuse of an warm container for multiple activations concurrently); this can improve throughput for those actions that can tolerate it (FYI per-action config is not implemented yet). It suffers from similar inaccuracy of kafka message ingestion at invoker “how many messages should I read”? But I think we can tune this a bit by adding some intelligence to Invoker/MessageFeed like “if I never see ContainerPool indicate it is busy, read more next time” - that is, allow ContainerPool to backpressure MessageFeed based on ability to consume, and not (as today) strictly on consume+process. - Another variant we are investigating is putting a ContainerPool into Controller. This will prevent container reuse across controllers (bad!), but will bypass kafka(good!). I think this will be plausible for actions that support concurrency, and may be useful for anything that runs as blocking to improve a few ms of latency, but I’m not sure of all the ramifications yet. Another (more far out) approach combines some of these is changing the “scheduling” concept to be more resource reservation and garbage collection. Specifically that the ContainerPool could be a combination of self-managed resources AND remote managed resources. If no proper (warm) container exists locally or remotely, a self-managed one is created, and advertised. Other ContainerPool instances can leverage the remote resources (containers). To pause or remove a container requires advertising intent to change state, and giving clients time to veto. So there is some added complication in the start/reserver/pause/rm container lifecycle, but the case for reuse is maximized in best case scenario (concurrency tolerant actions) and concurrency intolerant actions have a chance to leverage a broader pool of containers (iff the ability to reserve a shared available container is fast enough, compared to starting a new cold one). There is a lot wrapped in there (how are resources advertised, what are the new states of lifecycle, etc), so take this idea with a grain of salt. Specific to your PR: do you need an SPI for ContainerProxy? Or can it just be designated by the ContainerPool impl to use a specific ContainerProxy variant? I think these are now and will continue to be tied closely together, so would manage them as a single SPI. Thanks Tyson [1] https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/pull/2795<https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk/pull/2795#pullrequestreview-115830270> On May 16, 2018, at 10:42 PM, Dominic Kim <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Dear all. Does anyone have any comments on this? Any comments or opinions would be greatly welcome : ) I think we need around following changes to take this in. 1. SPI supports for ContainerProxy and ContainerPool ( I already opened PR for this: https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fapache%2Fincubator-openwhisk%2Fpull%2F3663&data=02%7C01%7Ctnorris%40adobe.com%7Cb2dd7c5686bc466f92f708d5bbb8f43d%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636621325405375234&sdata=KYHyOGosc%2BqMIFLVVRO2gYCYZRegfQLl%2BfGjSvtGI9k%3D&reserved=0) 2. SPI supports for Throttling/Entitlement logics 3. New loadbalancer 4. New ContainerPool and ContainerProxy 5. New notions for limit and logics to hanlde more fine-grained limit.(It should be able to coexist with existing limit) If there's no any comments, I will open a PR based on it one by one. Then it would be better for us to discuss on this because we can directly discuss over basic implementation. Thanks Regards Dominic. 2018-05-09 11:42 GMT+09:00 Dominic Kim <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: One more thing to clarify is invoker parallelism. ## Invoker coordinates all requests. I tend to disagree with the "cannot take advantage of parallel processing" bit. Everything in the invoker is parallelized after updating its central state (which should take a **very** short amount of time relative to actual action runtime). It is not really optimized to scale to a lot of containers *yet*. More precisely, I think it is related to Kafka consumer rather than invoker. Invoker logic can run in parallel. But `MessageFeed` seems not. Once outstanding message size reaches max size, it will wait for messages processed. If few activation messages for an action are not properly handled, `MessageFeed` does not consume more message from Kafka(until any messages are processed). So subsequent messages for other actions cannot be fetched or delayed due to unprocessed messages. This is why I mentioned invoker parallelism. I think I should rephrase it as `MessageFeed` parallelism. As you know partition is unit of parallelism in Kafka. If we have multiple partitions for activation topic, we can setup multiple consumers and it will enable parallel processing for Kafka messages as well. Since logics in invoker can already run in parallel, with this change, we can process messages entirely in parallel. In my proposal, I split activation messages from container coordination message(action parallelism), assign more partition for activation messages(in-topic parallelism) and enable parallel processing with multiple consumers(containers). Thanks Regards Dominic. 2018-05-08 19:34 GMT+09:00 Dominic Kim <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: Thank you for the response Markus and Christian. Yes I agree that we need to discuss this proposal in abstract way instead in conjunction it with any specific technology because we can take better software stack if possible. Let me answer your questions line by line. ## Does not wait for previous run. Yes it is valid thoughts. If we keep cumulating requests in the queue, latency can be spiky especially in case execution time of action is huge. So if we want to take this in, we need to find proper way to balance creating more containers for latency and making existing containers handle requests. ## Not able to accurately control concurrent invocation. Ok I originally thought this is related to concurrent containers rather than concurrent activations. But I am still inclined to concurrent containers approach. In current logic, it is dependent on factors other than real concurrent invocations. If RTT between controllers and invokers becomes high for some reasons, controller will reject new requests though invokers are actually idle. ## TPS is not deterministic. I meant not deterministic TPS for just one user rather I meant system-wide deterministic TPS. Surely TPS can vary when heterogenous actions(which have different execution time) are invoked. But currently it's not easy to figure out what the TPS is with only 1 kind of action because it is changed based on not only heterogeneity of actions but the number of users and namespaces. I think at least we need to be able to have this kind of official spec: In case actions with 20 ms execution time are invoked, our system TPS is 20,000 TPS(no matter how many users or namespaces are used). Your understanding about my proposal is perfectly correct. Small thing to add is, controller sends `ContainerCreation` request based on processing speed of containers rather than availability of existing containers. BTW, regarding your concern about Kafka topic, I think we may be fine because, the number of topics will be unbounded, but the number of active topics will be bounded. If we take this approach, it is mandatory to limit retention bytes and duration for each topics. So the number of active topics is limited and actual data in them are also limited, so I think that would be fine. But it is necessary to have optimal configurations for retention and many benchmark to confirm this. And I didn't get the meaning of eventual consistency of consumer lag. You meant that is eventual consistent because it changes very quickly even within one second? Thanks Regards Dominic 2018-05-08 17:25 GMT+09:00 Markus Thoemmes <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: Hey Dominic, Thank you for the very detailed writeup. Since there is a lot in here, please allow me to rephrase some of your proposals to see if I understood correctly. I'll go through point-by-point to try to keep it close to your proposal. **Note:** This is a result of an extensive discussion of Christian Bickel (@cbickel) and myself on this proposal. I used "I" throughout the writeup for easier readability, but all of it can be read as "we". # Issues: ## Interventions of actions. That's a valid concern when using today's loadbalancer. This is noisy-neighbor behavior that can happen today under the circumstances you describe. ## Does not wait for previous run. True as well today. The algorithms used until today value correctness over performance. You're right, that you could track the expected queue occupation and schedule accordingly. That does have its own risks though (what if your action has very spiky latency behavior?). I'd generally propose to break this out into a seperate discussion. It doesn't really correlate to the other points, WDYT? ## Invoker coordinates all requests. I tend to disagree with the "cannot take advantage of parallel processing" bit. Everything in the invoker is parallelized after updating its central state (which should take a **very** short amount of time relative to actual action runtime). It is not really optimized to scale to a lot of containers *yet*. ## Not able to accurately control concurrent invocation. Well, the limits are "concurrent actions in the system". You should be able to get 5 activations on the queue with today's mechanism. You should get as many containers as needed to handle your load. For very short-running actions, you might not need N containers to handle N messages in the queue. ## TPS is not deterministic. I'm wondering: Have TPS been deterministic for just one user? I'd argue that this is a valid metric on its own kind. I agree that these numbers can drop significantly under heterogeneous load. # Proposal: I'll try to rephrase and add some bits of abstraction here and there to see if I understood this correctly: The controller should schedule based on individual actions. It should not send those to an arbitrary invoker but rather to something that identifies those actions themselves (a kafka topic in your example). I'll call this *PerActionContainerPool*. Those calls from the controller will be handled by each *ContainerProxy* directly rather than being threaded through another "centralized" component (the invoker). The *ContainerProxy* is responsible for handling the "aftermath": Writing activation records, collecting logs etc (like today). Iff the controller thinks that the existing containers cannot sustain the load (i.e. if all containers are currently in use), it advises a *ContainerCreationSystem* (all invokers combined in your case) to create a new container. This container will be added to the *PerActionContainerPool*. The invoker in your proposal has no scheduling logic at all (which is sound with the issues lined out above) other than container creation itself. # Conclusion: I like the proposal in the abstract way I've tried to phrase above. It indeed amplifies warm-container usage and in general should be superior to the more statistical approach of today's loadbalancer. I think we should discuss this proposal in an abstract, non-technology-bound way. I do think that having so many kafka topics including all the rebalancing needed can become an issue, especially because the sheer number of kafka topics is unbounded. I also think that the consumer lag is subject to eventual consistency and depending on how eventual that is it can turn into queueing in your system, even though that wouldn't be necessary from a capacity perspective. I don't want to ditch the proposal because of those concerns though! As I said: The proposal itself makes a lot of sense and I like it a lot! Let's not trap ourselves in the technology used today though. You're proposing a major restructuring so we might as well think more green-fieldy. WDYT? Cheers, Christian and Markus
